Rock Hill, S.C.
Inside his company’s conference room, where the walls are lined with photos of sites his real-estate business has developed, Ralph Norman is talking about how he arrived at this point.
He’s favored to win a seat in Congress later this month. But it has been a long path for the 63-year-old Rock Hill native—and a tougher one than you might expect for a well-connected conservative businessman in one of the country’s most solidly Republican states. Politics in South Carolina has never lived up to the genteel Southern stereotype. Norman, despite his soft drawl, has no problem speaking pointedly, either.
He ran for the Fifth Congressional District seat once before, 11 years ago, against a longtime Democratic incumbent. He lost and returned to Columbia as a state legislator, where he earned high marks for fiscal discipline but never quite fit into the Republican establishment.
This year, when President Trump tapped Rep. Mick Mulvaney as budget director, Norman saw an opening. He fought his way through a crowded field of seven Republicans and finished second in the primary, by 135 votes—good enough to force a mid-May runoff.
His Republican opponent was Tommy Pope, the number-two official in the South Carolina statehouse. Pope, a well-known former prosecutor, had endorsements from legislative leaders. PAC money flowed his way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sponsored a pro-Pope ad featuring popular South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy.
Norman, who loaned his campaign more than $300,000, was backed by Jim DeMint (a former two-term senator for South Carolina), the Club for Growth, and Sen. Ted Cruz, who helped him campaign in the district.
On May 16, Norman eked out a 221-vote victory. He hasn’t forgotten who helped him—and who opposed him. Should he win the June 20 election, he says he will be proud to join the House Freedom Caucus, the group of about 30 conservatives that pushes legislation rightward and has been a thorn in the side of House leadership.
“They came to my aid when the Chamber attacked me,” Norman says.
On paper, a Republican running in South Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District should have an easy time. It stretches from the fast-growing northern suburban towns just across the border from Charlotte, N.C., toward Columbia, picking up a handful of rural counties. Trump and Mulvaney both won here in November by 20 points. The state Republican chairman told Politico last month, “I will eat my shoes if a Democrat wins.”
In a solidly red state like South Carolina, the Republican label can mask deep internal divisions. Republicans hold both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats, five of six House seats, all elected statewide offices, and commanding majorities in the state legislature. Yet some conservatives say the state’s policies tilt too far left.
“The leadership of the Republican party here is very, very liberal,” says Tara Servatius, a conservative talk radio host in nearby Greenville. “As I often say on the show, they would fit in better in Rhode Island than here.” She ticks off a long list of conservative disappointments: votes in the statehouse to raise the gas tax, repeated failures to pass an open-carry gun law, the continued support of an open primary election system in which Democrats can vote in Republican contests.
Norman, she notes, was one of only three South Carolina legislators to earn an “A” rating from the S.C. Club for Growth, while 44 Republicans received an “F.”
David Woodard, a Clemson political science professor, says that compared with Columbia’s establishment figures, Norman is “more of a traditional South Carolina conservative. . . . He’s pugnacious. He’ll get in your face.” He says Norman went to the capitol and didn’t play the game of cozying up to the power structure.
That brawling, rebellious streak has a long history in South Carolina. The state has produced feisty political figures from John C. Calhoun and Preston Brooks to Strom Thurmond and Lee Atwater. Joe Wilson, the congressman who famously shouted “You lie!” at President Obama during a 2009 joint session of Congress, is from South Carolina.
“There’s just something different over here,” Woodard says. “They’re a little bit sharper, more on edge, more able to say things. . . . We did start the war, you know. And I’m not talking about Vietnam or Iraq.”
In an interview at his office, which sits alongside a vitamin store and a dance studio in a brick strip mall his company developed, Norman sounds polished. He seems most at ease talking about traditional conservative issues: cutting spending, balancing the budget, fully funding the military, repealing and replacing Obamacare, enacting tort reform. He’d like to see Congress make an effort on term limits, and he supports entitlement reform. His campaign website says he favors raising the retirement age by two months and lowering benefits for the top 10 percent of earners to keep Social Security solvent. He’s less talkative, though, about social issues. He considers himself a pro-life Christian—a de facto job requirement for Republicans in these parts—and hands over a mailer his campaign sent out with a big photo of a swaddled infant that calls Norman “the proven pro-life leader we need in Congress.”
Those seeking stinging rebukes of Trump, though, will have to look elsewhere. Trump, Norman points out, has put a conservative on the Supreme Court and will sign legislation coming from a Republican Congress. Last fall, he says, the choice was clear.
“Hillary Clinton, had she won, the country would have been pretty well destroyed, by my way of thinking,” he says. “Now, we have a mandate to move forward with conservative ideas.”
The voters he talks with, he says, are patient. But they expect results.
“The public is saying, ‘We want the engine to run now. The engine has got to run,’ ” Norman says. “Is Trump still popular? Yes. Would he win by 20?” He pauses to think. “Maybe 15. They see him trying, and they get that the press is not supporting him.”
Standing between Norman and Washington is Democrat Archie Parnell, 66, a tax lawyer making his first run for office. Parnell acknowledges that the Fifth District is tough for Democrats, but points out that special elections have low turnouts that can neutralize advantages. Turnout in last month’s Republican runoff was about 8 percent.
Parnell says there’s a lot of enthusiasm for his candidacy. When he went to one county’s Democratic headquarters, staffers had to open up a second adjoining room to accommodate the overflow crowd.
The voters he talks to, he says, are concerned: “They think things are just off the rails, out of whack. A lot of people are actually afraid of what’s going on in Washington.”
Parnell describes himself as a moderate. He says he favors good constituent service, creating jobs, “protecting Social Security and Medicare,” and sticking up for working folks. He knocks Norman for repeated votes in the state legislature against spending that would have helped farmers and workers. For his part, Norman describes Parnell as “Bernie Sanders with a different name.”
Parnell is heartened by a poll in late May that showed him losing by 10 points. An earlier poll had him losing by 17.
He says that in debates before the primaries, he was the only one of three Democratic and seven Republican candidates to enthuse about working together, across party lines, to solve the country’s urgent problems.
That kumbaya approach of consensus-building and bipartisanship might play well in some parts of the country. Whether it’s a winning message in rough-and-tumble South Carolina will be determined June 20.
Tony Mecia is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
